[Ocha]

I was patient and calm for 30 minutes trying to get same day flight after Turkish Airlines bumped me off my connecting flight and told me to wait 24h in airport for next one. They kept giving me different excuses why they cannot put me in airport hotel, why they can’t put me on a different airline that had flights and only gave me $12 food voucher. After yelling at them for 5 min I was booked on KLM flight departing in 2 hours.

You can have assholes on both sides and set up is already adversarial from the get-go

[whstl]

I once lost a flight home (I was overseas) because the website of a company said there was a connecting bus between the airports I should take. The bus wasn’t there. I naturally lost the flight and had a very heated discussion with the clerk who was insisting that the website I was showing wasn’t theirs because I found it via Google (it had the same domain).

It was solved when I found the same information in the email sent by them.

Suddenly the clerk was apologetic and pretended she misunderstood the situation.

There are definitely capital-A assholes in both sides, with people willing to lie through the teeth to someone stranded in a foreign country just to avoid some minor inconvenience.

[t_luke]

I’ve had the same experience on a flight. They said the plane was overweight and we couldnt travel. The person I was travelling with became extremely difficult. Then magically, it wasn’t overweight any more.

[ornornor]

TK is so heinous I will never ever fly them or go through IST ever again. I’ve been stranded 36 hours in IST, put in the shittiest hotel after queuing 3h for said hôtel and 3h again for a meal voucher that no restaurant accepts.

And they just plainly ignored me when I demanded later they compensate us for the cancelations as per the aviation rules. They did the same when our lawyer got involved.

I’ll never fly TK again and tell anyone whenever this came up. Look reviews up for yourself online, hundreds of people report being stranded, abused, and disrespected in IST by TK the way we were.

[TeMPOraL]

Problem is, if you start looking up reviews online, it might turn out that every single airline is about as garbage as everyone else.

It's the case with telcos. My pet theory is that there's a kind of stable equilibrium there, with competing telcos all doing the same dirty tricks and being bad to customers in the same ways, and they don't care about losing business, because people don't suddenly stop needing mobile phones or Internet, and thus, on average, for every lost customer that switches to a competitor, they gain one that switched from a competitor.

[rstuart4133]

> It's the case with telcos.

Here in Australia the government owns the last mile (the government org is called the NBN), but you have to buy your connection off them through a retailer.

Our biggest retailers predate that arrangement. They are exactly as you describe. They are expensive. Their customer service is complete crap, echoing all the complaints you see here. The small ones the NBN enabled are the reverse: cheaper, and the customer service ranges from OK to brilliant. Brilliant invariably costs more, so you get what you pay for.

So your theory is wrong, or at least the equilibrium you paint is incomplete. I can give you a clue on how a large dominant ISP can survive in a highly competitive market: their advertising saturates the airwaves. They use their higher prices, lack of service and scale efficiencies to pay for it.

It doesn't work so well on me. I suspect like most people here I will happily do a couple hours of research on prices and forums before making a purchase. The continued existance of these big ISP's can be explained by one thing: most people don't put that effort in.

Putting in the effort only works if there are alternatives if course, and this is where there is a glaring difference between Australia and the USA: whereas everybody in Australia gets to choose from literally hundreds of ISP's (most tiny), I regularly see complaints from Americans they get no or very few choices. That's because Australia governments go out of there way to engineer competitive markets. ISP's are just example. You see similar efforts in water, banking, insurance - lots of places. In the case of the NBN it was extraordinarily heavy handed. After years of existing telcos refusing to upgrade the copper network without being given a monopoly the government owned NBN was created to overbuilt it with fibre, rendering the old copper network worthless.

I doubt the USA's worship of "free markets" would permit such behaviour, which I suspect is the real reason you are stuck with shitty customer service. There is no point providing good customer service if there is no competition, and if there competition the usual approach in the USA seems to be Peter Thiel's: eliminate it.

[dostick]

Its never ends to surprise how Australian public is brainwashed by own government. It’s opposite in Australia, a monopoly of network providers with variety of “competitive” ISPs that have exactly same prices and services. And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else. Any network issues they forward to network provider.

[rstuart4133]

> And ISPs are basically billing companies and nothing else.

For anybody reading this and thinking it looks reasonable, one outcome of having all these ISP is net neutrality isn't a problem in Australia.

ISP's used to often offer discounted services for certain traffic, like Netflix or traffic that originated in Australia. "Used to" because landline traffic is so cheap now I haven't seen a data limited landline plan in a long while. Charging differently depending on where bytes came from wasn't a problem precisely because there are so many ISP's to chose from. If you didn't like one, move to another. Download limits are still a thing on mobile data plans, so you still occasionally see it happen there.

Also, the NBN isn't technically a monopoly. Anyone is free to pay a third party to run fiber to their house. The NBN is a practical monopoly because it's very expensive to run a new fibre through kilometres of suburban footpaths, and it makes absolutely no sense when the NBN already has fibre in those footpaths and will supply any house beside it with a 1Gbps connection. However, it does make sense for business to run their own fibre because they usually aren't in the burb's (so it's cheap'ish) and don't want to share a line (privacy and predictable latencies), so they often do pay for parties a third part like VOCUS to run fibre to them.

Finally, even though the NBN is a practical monopoly on landline for households, there are competing technologies like 5G and starlink which everyone is free to use. In fact I'm using 5G right at home because I'm waiting for fibre. The reason they don't use it is these competing technologies are slower, have higher latencies, and are more expensive.

I'm not sure who is the brainwashed one here - the Australian public quite correctly understands the vast bulk of Australians have lots of choice on what to internet connection options they have available to them.

[yerushalayim]

Not accurate. Factually, some are much worse than others. A few are good to great. Lumping them all together as "garbage" is unjust and is totally counterproductive. Why even try when your efforts are unappreciated?

[netsharc]

Sounds like AirBnB support, hired to be as big as delaying fuckwits as possible so the company has to pay out as little compensation as possible.

[biotinker]

We had a very unpleasant experience with AirBnB support when we stayed in a house that it turned out was infested by bats, which we discovered when we awoke to bats in the bedroom.

For anyone unaware, bat bites are so small they are not detectable, and sleeping in the same room as one is sufficient to be considered a rabies exposure.

When we reported this to the local health department while dropping off a captured bat for rabies testing, they said that previous guests had also made similar complaints about the same house.

So despite numerous guests complaining about rabies exposures, AirBnB went back and forth for nearly 6 months afterwards before finally granting a refund.

[sokoloff]

I’ve had overwhelmingly good experiences with AirBnB, but I did have one place that I checked into in Vegas in July with the water shutoff. Support initially suggested that I stay there anyway, since it was only one night. I laughed and politely declined that “resolution” to my case and they eventually relented to refund my money.